My theory of human evolution assumes that art evolved because it acted like a ramp. It helped bridge the technical gap between one useful tool and the next. Tools have the property that almost all the necessary knowledge is no help. If you have 90% of the technical knowledge you need to build a gun, you can’t build a gun that works 90% as well as an actual gun; in fact, you won’t be able to build a useful gun at all. The point is even clearer with computers: Until you have a vast amount of technical knowledge, you can’t build even the crudest possible computer. When you finally get enough knowledge to build a very crude but working version, then increases in technical knowledge will help you improve it. But eventually you will reach a ceiling where more technical knowledge has little payoff. This state of affairs is shown by the “without art” function of this graph:
Art is different. Because we value novelty in art, and improvements in technology have obvious effects (e.g., new colors, brighter colors, sharper lines), each little improvement in technology — in the “state of the art” — is rewarded, long before that increase in knowledge helps build something more conventionally useful. Artists were the first material scientists.
Support for my assumption that evolution can build such ramps comes from a little-known psychological effect called quasi-reinforcement discovered by Allen Neuringer and Shin-Ho Chung. Suppose you require a pigeon to peck a key 300 times to get food. It will peck, but slowly. Now you change the situation so that every 20 pecks a light comes on for a few seconds. Although the pigeon will not peck a key simply to turn on a light, this change will roughly double the peck rate — a huge increase given that food per peck hasn’t changed. It’s like doubling the amount of work you get from an employee without a salary increase. I use this effect daily. Given any large task, I break it into much smaller tasks and mark the completion of each one. A friend of mine found it helped to make a mark on a piece of paper each time she read a textbook page. The quasi-reinforcement effect is essentially a ramp that helps us do long tasks that would otherwise pay off only when completed.
To me, blogging is a kind of ramp: It breaks a big task (e.g., writing about my omega-3 research) into much smaller parts with reward after each one.
years ago i did bio-feed back training. The object was to maintain a state of mind in a particular range of brain waves (i forget the precise type of brain wave). When i maintained the desired state i got the equivalent of brownie points which were reflected on a screen and after i reached a sufficient number of points a grand finale occurred, such as a compute depiction of a volcano erupting or fireworks. this reminds me of what you call “quasi-reinforcement.” you also see it on message boards, where posters appear to compete for recognition and “recommendations” of their messages. a broader inquiry would be the evolutionary purposes of what you call quasi-reinforcement and its derivatives, since it appears to manifest itself widely.
Although your argument is appealing, I think you are ignoring the same nature of incremental development that happens in all of technology. For example, the Internet has been one of the most impressive technical tools to recently happen. To think that all of the parts of the Internet had to be in place and working for it to have value is wrong. There was a constant pattern of developing useful small changes in the 25 years prior to the world “discovering” the Internet — each a small refinement of previous results. That pattern of small improvements is repeated over and over in the tool making world.
Seth, you may enjoy The Artful Mind, which collects some recent work on what might be called “scientific aesthetics” (e.g., Zeki).